Crackling Vignettes From an Adventurer’s Life

‘Song From the Uproar’ at the Kitchen

Abigail Fischer as Isabelle Eberhardt in Missy Mazzoli's “Song From the Uproar” at the Kitchen.Credit
Karsten Moran for The New York Times

In the story of Isabelle Eberhardt, a 19th-century Swiss adventuress who blazed a headstrong trail before perishing prematurely in Algeria at 27, there surely is a saga worthy of operatic treatment. Eberhardt learned Arabic, converted to Islam, dressed as a man to travel freely, survived an assassination attempt and died in a flash flood after saving her Algerian soldier husband from the same fate.

But in “Song From the Uproar — The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt,” which had its full-length premiere at the Kitchen on Friday night, the composer Missy Mazzoli adopted a suitably idiosyncratic approach. Recounting key moments from Eberhardt’s life in a 75-minute sequence of dreamy vignettes linked by electronic segues that crackled like ancient shortwave, Ms. Mazzoli and her collaborators fashioned an earnest, enveloping meditation that invited individual interpretation.

Some aspects of the staging still had a slightly homespun charm, as when a hookah descended from the rafters at the jerky pace of a stagehand’s exertions. But in the emotional efficacy and irresistible magnetism of Ms. Fischer’s performance and in the electric surge of Ms. Mazzoli’s score you felt the joy, risk and limitless potential of free spirits unbound.

A version of this review appears in print on February 27, 2012, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Song From the Uproar’: The Kitchen. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe